Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Paya case going nowhere in Spanish courts

The effort to have Spanish courts
take on the case of Oswaldo Paya is not going well.

Paya’s family asked Spanish courts
to commute the sentence of Angel Carromero, the Spanish Partido Popular
activist who drove the car in which Paya and fellow dissident Harold Cepero
were killed last July. A judge turned
down that request.The final
decision rests with the government, which does
not seem disposed to commute.

Separately, the family asked a court
to re-investigate the case and find two Cuban officials guilty of murder based
on Carromero’s charge that his car was rammed and driven off the road.Last week, a court turned down that request
too (background here,
see also article in El
Pais, the judge’s decision,
and EFE
in English).The family indicated that
it would appeal the decision.

I don’t know how much room for
maneuver the Spanish courts and executive would have in this case in the event
that they were to find the family’s political and legal arguments
convincing.What comes through in these
decisions is that in bringing Carromero home under the bilateral prisoner
exchange agreement, the Spanish government – and, apparently, by extension its
courts – seems to have accepted the Cuban verdict on Carromero as a settled
matter (“firme”) and finds no reason,
no basis, and no jurisdiction to re-open the case.In last week’s decision, the judge said it
would be “abusive” to assert Spanish courts are competent to
re-investigate.

Abusive or not, and taking Spain and
Cuba out of the equation, it is hard to see how any prisoner exchange agreement could function if
one party would use it to bring prisoners home and then declare the foreign
verdicts invalid and release the prisoners.

One can’t fault Carromero for
wanting to get out of jail in Cuba and go home.But by coming home under that agreement he appears to have wrecked any
chance he might have had to make his case in Spanish courts.If his idea from the beginning was to charge
that his car was rammed – something he only began to say after months back in
Spain – then it seems that the place to make that argument would have been in
Cuba, with whatever risk that would entail.The Washington
Post rises above all this to argue that Spanish courts have every reason to
take up the case.

In this new radio
interview, Carromero says that had he done so, he “might not have gotten
out alive and my message would not have gotten out of the island.”He reminds listeners that he was “only 26”
when all this happened, and he whines about how he was covered in the Spanish
media.Based on that coverage, he said,
he decided to give his first public statement to the Washington Post editorial
page.Asked why his companion, Swedish
activist Aron Modig, has offered no support and no statements, Carromero says
little and notes that Modig has “mysteriously” left politics. The interview by Luis del Pino also provides
fodder for those who argue that behind Carromero’s statements there is an intra-party
rivalry playing out between Carromero’s champion Esperanza Aguirre and Prime
Minister Rajoy, who is being accused of passivity and appeasement.